


No Rest For The Living

by Syntax



Category: Doom (Video Games)
Genre: Classic Timeline, Gen, Ghosts, Hallucinations, I didn't know how to end this, Mixed with the RPG Timeline a little, POV Second Person, Post-Doom 2, Prompt Fic, in that Doomguy has a relative named Stan who was also on Mars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24325840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syntax/pseuds/Syntax
Summary: Your fatigue was enormous, the price for encountering pure evil.  Hell was a place no mortal was meant to experience.  Stupid military doctors; their tests and treatments were of little help.  In the end, what did it matter—it was all classified and sealed.  The nightmares continued.You're honestly surprised it took this long to start seeing things when you weren't asleep.
Kudos: 23





	No Rest For The Living

**Author's Note:**

> lon-duhb Today at 1:20 PM  
> "dont act like you've never seen a dead person talking before" plus doom

They set you up with an apartment after your return from the second invasion. You're under no illusions that this is a kindness on the part of the military. Twice now, demons have invaded and tried to take over. Twice now, everyone sent to handle the situation except you died horribly. Twice now, you've gotten it all done on your own.

The military didn't put you here because your house got destroyed in the first wave and they have a responsibility to their heroic soldiers. They put you here because you're an asset now, and they want to keep as close an eye on you as possible.

It's probably a blessing for them that you can't really find the energy to care about the situation right now.

Your apartment is a small place on one of the airforce bases, where you could hear the jets take off multiple times per day and try to tell yourself the screaming was just engines. The whole thing is about as big as your old house's living room, and you spend more time than you care to admit checking all the rooms to confirm that they're empty. You spent your first few days here opening all the doors over and over because you kept hearing the sound of demons popping in from nowhere, and like hell were you going to be taken by surprise in your own damn apartment. The rooms were always empty. Eventually you got tired of closing everything and just ripped the doors off their hinges.

Management was pissed at you for that stunt. You can't really find the energy to care about that either.

You know you have neighbors, people who could hear you in the event something actually did pop in unexpectedly, people you'd probably have to evacuate at the first sign of trouble. There's a few trainees living in the apartments next to yours, one or two instructors living on the floors above and below. You don't know any of their names. They don't know your name either. They don't know anything about who you are or what you've done. Probably because the official reports say you're supposed to be dead.

Just like everyone else you know.

That. _Is_ something you care about. It's something you care about a lot more than you'd like to.

You're sitting on a shitty couch in a tiny apartment with all the lights turned off so you can more easily notice any sudden flashes of hellfire, pressing your thumb into the little toes of a rabbit's foot keychain like it's the only thing that's keeping your heart pumping. For all you know, it might be. You don't know a damn thing about what's going on inside you anymore.

You don't even know if you're still alive.

Maybe you're not. Maybe that's why you keep seeing ghosts.

Your eyes flip over to the island counter a few yards away.

Your brother stares back at you, faintly glowing in the dark and still wearing the armor he was killed in. You know it's the same armor. It's still got all the chips and gouges in it that you couldn't tear your eyes away from when they called you in to identify his body. His face was too badly damaged from whatever killed him. All you had to go on were his tattoos.

The ghost leaning against your counters has his face _and_ his tattoos, and you're not really sure if you should be thankful for that or not.

"You gonna just sit there and stare at me?" Stan's ghost asks you. It has his voice too, just like you remember. Not even any weird undertones or whispers or anything. The fucking movies lied to you.

"What is there to say?" You reply. "You're not really there."

You keep pressing the toes on Daisy's foot. You can feel the hard keratin of her little claws against your thumb. They needed to be trimmed.

"Come on, Will," Stan's ghost says all exasperated like he used to when you took a few times to get what he was saying, "Don't act like you've never seen a dead person talking before. There's bound to have been loads of 'em on the first tour."

You feel your eye twitching at the memory.

You know what he's talking about. You know he knows what he's talking about, too. The possessed soldiers wandering around the UAC base, bloodied and broken and still looking too much like they had when they were alive for you to not feel bad about gunning them down, no matter how necessary it was. You never encountered Stan as one of them, but you have no doubt that's what happened to him.

You turn away to stare at the wall. You can't bear looking at his face anymore. It keeps turning sallow and green in your mind's eye.

"They didn't talk," You say. "They just yelled."

They yelled when they wandered around, they yelled when they fired their weapons, they yelled when you killed them. You can still hear it ringing in your ears, making you grip the armrest of your chair tighter so you don't risk breaking the fragile bones in Daisy's paw. You force yourself to breathe deeply for a few moments. There's nothing in your apartment. You would've seen the flash from something teleporting in.

"That so? Shit. That's rude."

Your brother sounds unimpressed. You grip the chair harder.

"Why are you here, Stan."

"Am I not allowed to visit my little brother?" You hear him ask, affronted.

"You're dead, Stan," you say, and it comes out far more raw that you ever wanted it to. You feel something hot streaming down your face. The only reason you know it isn't blood is because of the smell.

He's dead. Him, your parents, your neighbors, and everyone else that the two of you became soldiers to protect in the first place. You saw his body. You held his hand.

Everyone was dead. Even you, according to the papers.

One of Daisy's claws nicks the skin of your thumb. You barely notice. You just keep staring at the wall, ever so slightly illuminated by the light coming from the counter tops.

"I wouldn't exactly call _this_ living, Will."

You wouldn't either.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been hitting a wall every time I try to write recently so I decided to open up prompt suggestions on my tumblr
> 
> Haven't gotten any bites yet so I complained about it to a friend and she sent me a prompt on discord
> 
> You can thank her for this


End file.
